Monday, February 26, 2018

Mini game release: Aster

This game is a collaboration I worked on with another artist, who I'll simply refer to as S. It's an Asteroids/arcade style game with in-game H-animations.

While it isn't the usual size or complexity of my other games, it ended up taking me a while to get around to finishing, mostly because the music and sound gave me a bit of artist's block. The bulk of the work was done (including the H animations, which were done by the artist), a couple years ago, so I felt like I should probably get it out of the way, being the smallest project.

In total, the game has 10 animations (no CGs). The demo covers about half of the game and it's content. Since it's not the usual sort of game, I've decided to do a bit of a pay-what-you-want thing, with a $1 minimum. You can play the demo and decide for yourself what you think it's worth. The profits will be split 50/50 between the artist and myself.

Also, if you pre-ordered Noaika, your unlock file will work with this, so you dont need to buy it.

As per usual, this is the initial release so there's sure to be some bugs. Let me know in the comments if you run into any problems.

Also, as I stated before I'd start posting on the blog again once I released something, and while this isnt a big game this is something. I'll also be making an dedicated page soon showing the ongoing status of all my projects, what I'm working on, etc.

I'm not having any luck getting the game to recognize my controller. I'm using a PS3 controller, set to be recognized as Xinput via Scp Toolkit. Tested several other games (including Eroico) and it's being recognized fine in them.

This game is a worthy addition to your collection, being as well-designed and artistically appealing as your previous two games if not more so. I feel that if this game had more weapons, enemies, and procedural elements, it could sell on Steam as a small roguelite akin to Downwell. The only issue I experienced while playing was a crash during the final boss.

My only complaint is that I got easily disoriented by the dead space around the edges of the screen where you can't see your ship. That likely has more to do with my lack of spacial reasoning though.

As always, I'm eager to see what you'll release next. I hope that the artist's block you experienced taught you more about audio design to bring into future games.

It's somewhat frustrating to play this without having mouse control of the aiming, as other games of the same genre have done. It was annoying in the original asteroids as well, but a lot more so when you have enemies coming after you with auto-targeting attacks.

I did find two minor bugs, when setting the game to borderless fullscreen via AutoHotkey, the window continues to stretch to the right on its own on a dual monitor setup. I've never seen this in any other program since autohotkey itself only changes the window size once.

The second is that the fullscreen shortcut is set to Alt + F4 for some reason lol.

Autohotkey is just what it sounds like, you write scripts that execute keystrokes or commands. In this case I was setting the window size and position to the screen resolution, hiding the title bar and window edges outside the screen, which can't normally be done by dragging and resizing the window.

Not a bug but rather a graphic design suggestion - I would add in front thrusters somewhere to fire the flame when the ship is moving backwars. Otherwise, reversing feels somehow unnatural and, without the visual feedback, confusing until you actually notice the change in speed. Due to this, I had no idea I can move backwards for at least 10 first levels.

And here I was thinking the game was way too hard. I mean, I'm bad at Asteroids-like games, but I could barely reach stage 10 before figuring this out. Could make for an interesting challenge run, I suppose.

Huh. So I went and deleted the "save1" file and restarted the game assuming that's where it had it stored and it'd just autogenerate another one I could show you just to be sure it was fresh, but that seems to have fixed the problem. Resetting after the first checkpoint starts me at stage 3 now.

I guess having that file there was keeping the save in a static state or something? Not sure what to make of it really, and its not generating another one, so I'm not sure where else to find the save data but I guess it doesn't matter since its working now? Weird, but I'm not exactly going to complain.

Yeah, not sure.Hopefully V2 fixed the problem for anyone who has it. Though I might want to make it so the game doesnt come with the files already generated, to avoid the problem you had, if that caused it.

anyone else got a problem paying for it? i did pay and took my money but it says couldnt find my order and ask me to search again. in the end i didnt get any unlock archive but they took my money ?? scam?

Bought it, finished it, and loved it. If I want to give more, should I buy it again or donate? Fun way to spend a morning, and I ended up having so much fun I completed it before even looking at the galleries or h scenes. Loved the inflation scenes/stomache bulges the best!

Maybe. There's no reason not to, it's more just seeing if I still have the drive to do it lol. But I'll keep in it mind and will probably do it if there aren't any major problems over the next couple days.

How's everyone feeling about the weapons? I only really used the sword and sometimes the charge module. Laser felt unwieldy for me. Hard to really tell without HP bars but I found the charge module more useful against ships - even godsend at some points. The sword just wrecks creatures, also working over walls. I guess the explosive was for clearing asteroids but never really felt necessary and there's a period of vulnerability every time you charge it up.

Laser and Charge are my go-to's. Charge is pretty OP and one shots a lot of stuff.

The explosives also go over walls, so it's useful for that, in addition to clearing out asteroids. To me the sword is fun, but it's probably not the best. If I was going to make a change, I'd probably make it so the sword gets smaller like the laser, but make it so it blocks projectiles.

My personal favorite is the Charge Shot. It's just so powerful, and the shots persists for a while! The others have their uses, but their roles can generally be filled by a well-placed charge shot. I think the sword is the most useless, though. It has short range and doesn't even do enough damage to justify that.

I remember a while back you asked for interesting genre ideas for h-games. What about a pinball game? I feel like with a few changes, the physics of the gravity stages in this game would work for a pinball game.

It's a neat little game. I really enjoyed it. For such a small project, the scenes are absolutely incredible quality. I was not expecting them to be so nice. Outstanding work.

So I played through again with V2.

A few things I didn't notice until the second playthrough. When a scene is playing, you can hit the attack or boost buttons to stop whatever enemy's scene is currently playing. When defeated with multiple creatures on screen, this means you can switch scenes by giving the other creatures a chance to do their "grab". Only issue I see is that the green creature pretty much always wins the race when there's one present. Maybe you could make it so whatever enemy type gets "pushed off" has a small cooldown before it can initiate a scene again? That way you'd give the other ones a chance.

But the bigger thing. I didn't actually notice during my first playthrough that creatures could do scenes while you still had health. I didn't upgrade health much on my first go. So I didn't have enough health most of the time to notice it. Now that I've realized it though, there's a slight issue. I usually end up canceling the scenes out when they start because I'm spamming attack. Could you add a slight buffer time where hitting buttons doesn't stop the scenes right when they start? Just maybe a few seconds to give the player time to realize so they can stop pressing would probably be enough. Either that, or a different button entirely to "push" enemies off instead of having attack and boost do it.

You have been pretty pessimistic about this game. I'm not a fan of female mcs but honestly I still had fun with this game. Maybe my standard for h-games it too low especially when it comes to gameplay.

Well, that was a pretty nice little game. I finished off the last boss, but my ship got crippled at the same time, and there was still an enemy warship left, so I'm pretending I got a neutral end instead of the game going straight to the ending. :P

My game's saves weren't working, getting reset to stage 1 with each death. I followed the advice of another guy in here and deleted the save file, but no new one is being created. Whenever I die now I get set back, but the ship is already dead and the game won't move on. What to do?

So I moved the game to my program folder and the saves are working fine. However, I don't have a progress file so the gallery isn't being completed. I finished the game on one ship, but there's no progress.

To elaborate a little, by default the game tries to read and write to the txt files in the same folder as the game. If it can't save them there (and I have no idea why it wouldn't), it saves and loads from a folder in local appdata, which is what GM creates when you run a game.

What "should" happen is if one is missing, it saves an loads to the other. If you check appdata you'll see what files, if any, aren't able to save to the same folder as the game.

So first off. F this game. F Asteroid. F my childhood memories on Asteroid! I can't believe I've spent so long trying to beat this game...again! So in other words, Kudo's to you, You've made a fine version of the game and tugged on my nostalgia strings. Was well worth the full price, hell wish I could give you more if only to support your gaming endeavors. Now the only question I have is when is the Space t-rex DLC scene?

Nice! Has definitely made me even more hyped for Noaika, which (hopefully) will release before the heat death of the universe. Just hope you're enjoying that switch from GM:S to GM:S2... I know my wallet wasn't.

I noticed that when you lose and press start, the ship's status resets immediately, before the fadeout. This means the camera starts showing the heroine, and whatever weapon powerup you had at the checkpoint gets attached to the wreckage. Sometimes it even shoots. Have to press something, I think.

When losing a weapon powerup while holding the attack button, it disappears from the ship, but still works until you let go of the trigger. I once picked up another weapon during such a state, and I didn't get it - it just disappeared.

This is a fun game, and the H-content is... engaging. Especially considering how relatively vanilla everything is. I played Aeroid recently, and while it was a decent Metroid clone, the H part was uninspired.

I think the hardest set of levels between checkpoints was the one with the seeker missile ship. I still can't evade them reliably. Just lucked out once and beat it by dealing a lot of damage in a short amount of time.

Eroshmups have long been something I've had a soft spot for since the days of games like Sentimental Shooting, So some lewd Asteroids is right up my alley. Man, seeing content like this used in a horizontal or vertical style shmup in the vein of some Cave shooters or R-type would just be the best thing ever ;)

heyo This game is great but with a Design Sin that some Games do,the power-up unintentional trolling (Alot of Shumps have this)and i find this is the source of the difficulty in Aster,and the Charge Mod is JUST makes this Easy Mode ,if you know how to Aim,and that youb don't unluckly run into an asteroid that gives you a different module,etc.

In a game like casltevania (most of them), you can haves swappable items because the item pickup itself doesn't do anything other than change the weapon. In Aster, however, they double as shields, which means that the player will run into situations where they have to make a choice between their prefered weapon and a little extra survivability (Which I like).

There is the option of making this create an "empty" powerup so you could swap back without getting WP again, however this removes the risk/reward element of choosing to forgo WP.

The other option would be to make it so that there's a brief timer before the powerup becomes acquirable. This avoids the problem of picking it up by mistake immediately, however it also creates a problem where the player might be about to get shot down, and they try to get the powerup quickly but go through it. Getting killed seems worse than than getting some WP and getting a weapon you don't like, even if it would occur less.

A third option is making it so the powerup's default moving direction is "away" from the player, applying only a brief timer if an asteroid is hit. This is probably the most likely alternative.

Could also make it so the powerup can be shot and moved, however that would block the player's shots. Would only work if it blocked both the enemy and the player's shots, but that could still go wrong.

Well, even though there might be a market for mobile games somewhere, I'm just not a mobile guy honestly. I prefer to stick to PC, especially since I know I would have to worry about optimizing differently for different platforms if I did otherwise.

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